Correct.

Hell. We got snowed on crossing the North Cascades Highway at the end of May, and that tops out at only 5,200’.

Being from Atlanta, she probably considered flurries a “storm”. It wasn’t that long ago that a few inches paralyzed the city.

I still have questions about them growing in what is basically winter up there, and her finding them under meters of snow.

I consider myself a pre-Olympian at all their competitions, having never done them.

My theory is that she saw the Hunger Games films, with Katniss's awesome archery skills a key to her survival.

I understood it to be food she found in the unlocked cabin. I can't recall where I read it, but it makes more sense. My guess is that after 3 weeks, she was probably a bit incoherent.

I found a trail junction to Upper Hopkins Lake that fits that description at point B on the map. It's 14 miles from Vermillion Valley Resort (waypoint 4) & 40 miles from her start at China Peak Resort (point A). I'm wondering if that may be where her bike was left? About 1600 feet in elevation above Vermillion resort. Go to Komoot to zoom in, I could only post the screenshot.





This story makes no sense to me. She'd need to have had an intended destination with power to recharge her battery for the next day. Where was she planning to plug in that night before catastrophe struck? She would have had to continue north to a town on US 395 like Crowley Lake, another 24 miles across steep trails. 64 miles & 9800+ feet of climbing for the day, well beyond her battery range perhaps even if she was carrying a spare.

How much range do you lose if your e-bike battery is near freezing temps? Maybe 50 percent? I am guessing, I have no direct knowledge.

There is a reason that EVs have a mechanism to keep the battery warm. My phone, the battery life is much lower if I use it when it is in the 40s (F) compared to room temperature.

She says she kept a journal to keep sane. It will be interesting to see a little more of a timeline. For example:
- when/where was she in the avalanche that blocked her path, knocked her unconscious, etc.
- she was only in the cabin for ~8 hours when she was found. Some point before that she lost her tent, vestibule and was left with only a lighter and a knife - how long was she without a tent or sleeping bag? - https://www.yourcentralvalley.com/ne...ra-wilderness/
- She had a GPS that told her she was 18 miles from Starbucks, so presumably that would be towards the end of the valley, when was that in the timeline - https://www.ktvu.com/news/tiffany-sl...evada-moutains

Hopefully her journal can help decipher the rough timeline between events, where were these relative to the 23 days she was missing?
* crossing Kaiser Pass
* the avalanche that knocked her unconcious
* losing tent and sleeping bags
* leaving the bike
* GPS saying 18 miles from Starbucks
* finding the cabin (8 hours before finish)

I'm wondering now if she had originally planned on stopping at Mono Hot Springs (20 miles from China Peak), unaware that it was closed. The first article posted by indy says "Mono Hot Springs was a destination of hers". Then maybe continuing to Vermillion (4 miles further) finding it it closed also & continuing from there until disaster struck, then backtracking?

I'm just speculating, eagerly awaiting the movie!

I am not saying that some of her story makes no sense, but I'm not not saying that. https://archive.ph/w3UQA

She also claims to be rather experienced outdoors, but that last photo of her and the ebike shows her at high altitude in late spring without any sunglasses, and then she says she suffered eye damage from snow glare during her journey. Others have noted that in her presser, she said she got fustrated and asked Google on her phone for the nearest Starbucks...yet was not able to ever call 911. The LAT story also mentioned "wild leeks", but I haven't sourced that. Splinted her leg, which you do if it's broken, popped her other kneecap back, then hiked twenty miles on them in high-heeled boots, and now no sign of the injuries? She also found the cabin only eight hours before the owner found her...so it must have been wild leeks or a big bunch she brought with her and kept over the sleeping bags. Edit: the transcript does say she claims to have survived on foraged wild onions and manzanita tea for three weeks in freezing conditions, and only lost 11 lbs. OK, complete utter BS.

I haven't seen mentioned where she says she was knocked unconscious for two hours after the fall, which means a severe head injury, a concussion at the minimum. You just don't get up from those like nothing happened, despite what movies and TV shows have taught us. I've been lucky enough to never have been knocked out, but my understanding from talking to those that have is that it knocks out your short-term memory, so you don't remember what actually led up to it, such as the actual bike crash. So she should have just woken up after the avalanche, buried in snow and dead of hypothermia, without any idea of how she got there.

Others are making excuses for single oddities in her tale...but a whole storm of them makes it hard to believe. She lost all her survival gear, but was careful to carry and keep full journals of her ordeal, for later sale in a bidding war for the rights.

^^This^^

I haven't been following the latest development, but if the above is accurate, this is starting to sound fishy.

Reminds me of the story of the guy from the PNW who was riding across Canada or something for some charitable cause and claims to have been chased by a wolf. (Someone posted a link to an article in one of the forums.) If you read the account closely and really thought about it, a lot of things didn't add up. For example, he claimed his tent poles fell off the bike during the chase and "shattered". Tent poles somehow coming loose/out of the stuff sack and then shattering from such a short fall seems highly unlikely. The story went on the describe how he finally headed straight at an RV coming in middle of the road in the opposite direction. The RV allegedly stopped, the cyclist slammed on his breaks, vaulted over the handle bars (Don't try this at home, kids.), leaving his bike in the road in front of the RV, and entered the RV for safety. There was a photo of a wolf clearly taken from inside an RV, but it was taken from the back of an RV that was pulled over to the side of the road and parked in front of at least one other vehicle. There were other head-scratching parts of the story that I cannot remember.

Coincidentally, there had been a recent incident, complete with video footage, of a guy on a motorcycle being chased by a wolf. I could only conclude that the cyclist made up the story to increase traffic to his fundraising website, which it did.

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." (Lincoln 16th POTUS)

There is an LA Times article about the growing skepticism:

https://www.latimes.com/california/s...us-of-skeptics

Paywalled for me.

Heres another: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-b2756984.html

Anyone who has used a Garmin in a cellphone dead zone knows how this works. The phone's internal GPS also is independent of a cellular connection.

Some of the criticisms are as goofy as elements of her story.

Just as I suspected:

“According to the Fresno County Sheriff, Slaton's family reported her missing on April 29 after not hearing from her for nine days. The fundraiser was started a week later and continued to accept donations for a while after she was found.”

You can access the paywalled LAT story on the archive.today site: https://archive.ph/w3UQA It's legal.

It's weird that she called the tiny wild onions "wild leeks". There are no such thing, which a horticulturist should know. I'm not one, yet I still know that. Leeks are artificially bred cultivars of wild onions, bred to have a very thick edible stalk. They don't exist in the wilderness. Just say wild onions, lady. It's like saying that you survived on wild Cosmic Crisp apples or wild Gros Michel bananas.

Some things are too good to be true. If she had just managed to keep her mouth shut and not brag about her own amazingness...she could just say she has PSTD and doesn't want to relive the ordeal now, but maybe will talk to the press later.

Remember that a lot of money was wasted searching for her, and a lot of people risked their own lives in doing so.

Garmins use predownloaded maps. Phones don't, unless you specially download them for an offline GPS app, such as Organic Maps (freeware). Without a map, the GPS will just show your lat/long location, and altitude.

She claims to have been able to verbally ask Google where the nearest Starbucks was, yet not contact 911. Explain that. I suspect that there isn't any cell service at all up there, anyway...I can ride 12 flat miles east from here in suburban East San Diego, and be in a dead zone (El Monte Park)

No iPhone. No Siri.


I took that as a given.

You can still ask Google/Siri/whatever anything you want. You just won't get an answer.



I live in a cellphone dead zone, and am close enough to Santa Cruz to commute by bike.

I'm merely going to take this as a reminder to myself to get a PLB if I ever do a trip in the wilderness

"But you can fool enough of the people enough of the time!" (You know which POTUS)

Assuming the story is not legitimate, where was she for 3 weeks? Wonder if authorities might try to look into her credit/debit card histories.

That’s the big problem I have with things, real or faked. People going into the wild without the proper experience. There a trail Jim Thorpe, PA that takes you up to three waterfalls. It became very popular as the area started attracting more and more visitors.

The trail is very steep and difficult. Many inexperienced people would try it wearing inappropriate footwear. That resulted in numerous injuries and even a couple of deaths, requiring fairly regular emergency response. The drain on resources became too much, so authorities closed the trail. Not a month later, a woman wearing street shoes ignored the closure signs and had to be rescued after breaking her ankle.

This happens every wet winter on Mount Baldy northeast of Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Mountains. Novices and experienced hikers get into icy steep terrain, slip and fall down ice chutes hundreds of feet to their deaths or break limbs and cannot self-rescue and die due to exposure. S+R repeatedly warns that this is winter alpine conditions and people just don't comprehend this is a death trap. Sadly, S+R members have also perished. Hikers do not even have microspikes let alone ropes and crampons.

Has anything noteworthy come of this?